so true...

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen.

But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul's own doing.
- Marie Stopes

Here is a picture of Spongebob that Micah did, I thought it was cute, Micah is almost 5. 

from the wasteland....

My brother Matt made it home from Banda Aceh.
He said...It was an exhausting bizarre trip, felt like doing business in T.S. Elliot's "Wasteland".
He has been doing film work for various news outlets in areas where the Tsunami hit.
I am glad he is home and safe and look forward to seeing more of his journey here.
He is married to Thanita, a wonderful Thai woman, so I guess this disaster hits close to home for us, because her people are our people as Ruth put it.

Cause creates community...

The disciples are called to focus on others. It is this cause that creates the "must-ness" of Jesus' team, not the community of the team that creates the "must-ness" of the cause. As we say at Mosaic, cause creates community. Unlike many modern approaches, Jesus doesn't make being in community the mission. Neither does he promise amazing benefits to the disciples if they follow him.

 

He envisions a better future and MUST give his life to this mission. He calls his followers of both the first and twenty-first centuries to give their lives with him to something greater than themselves. When any person hears Jesus' call and recognizes the intrinsic beauty of what Jesus is doing, he will run with red-hot passion and join swords with anyone and everyone who hears as he does.

-Alex Mcmanus

Good or Bad sex advice....

The husband should not deprive his wife of sexual intimacy, which is her right as a married woman, not should the wife deprive her husband. -1 Corinthians 7:3

In contrast with the above verse, here is a look at past church teaching...

In the second century, Clement of Alexandria allowed unenjoyed and procreative sex only during 12 hours out of the 24 (at night) but by the middle ages, preposterous as it now seems, the church forbade it forty days before the important festival of Christmas, forty days before and 8 days after the more important festival of Easter, 8 days after Pentecost, the eves of feast days, on Sundays in honor of the resurrection, on Wednesdays to call to mind the beginning of Lent, Fridays in memory of the crucifixion, during pregnancy and 30 days after birth (40 if the child was a female), during menstruation, and 5 days before communion.

This adds up to 252 excluded days. Not counting feast days, if there were 30 of those (a guess which may in fact, be on the conservative side) there would then have been 83 remaining days in the year when (provided of course, that the woman did not happen to be menstruating or pregnant or in the postnatal period and provided that they intended procreation) couples could with the permission of the church have indulged in (but not enjoyed) sexual intercourse.

I found it! Finally after many months of being given up for stolen or lost, I found my Hammer necklace. I bought this in Oslo Norway after I gave a prophetic word on the Hammer of God while in Oslo. It was a precious word to me and this necklace was a symbol of all that word held. I was really bummed out when It disappeared. I found it in a box the other day...
 

Don't forget to follow through...

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

–Romans 12:21

No one can change what happened,

But what we can all change is what happens next.

-President George Bush Senior & President Bill Clinton,

in a TV ad for the 04 Tsunami

I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything,

but still I can do something

-Helen Keller

But if anyone has enough money to live well and sees a brother or sister in need and refuses to help, how can God's love be in that person?

-1 John 3:17

If not you, then who?

If not now, then when?

If not there, then where?

If your heartaches seem to hang around too long
And your blues keep getting bluer with each song
Remember sunshine can be found behind a cloudy sky
So let your hair down and go on and cry. -Johnny Ray. I just dig this photo, it captures passion...man I love it.
 

A Fresh rain.
1.14.05

I need a fresh rain.
My languishing soul is summer blacktop hot,
and the suffocating heat is gasping haunting wisps
of fiery serpents off my smoldering heart.

I need a fresh rain,
To cleanse the dry riverbed mud from my long jaded dreams,
that mock my thirst like a barren womb torments a longing wife.

I need a fresh rain,
Because I have forgotten the pungent fragrances
That would resurrect me to the very moment
I was forgetting to live within.

I need a fresh rain,
To drown the primordial thirst;
That my personal mirages, have left me gasping with.

A rain to heal the deep fissures that have been scratched
into my raw aching throat. A baptism sent to extinguish
my smoldering ghenna, whose smoke is choking my desire to plead.

I need a fresh rain to wash away my nagging memories
So like soil after a vigorous plowing, my mind can start over again.

I need a fresh rain.
The kind of afternoon down pour that evokes
a wild idea that one should dance in the overflow.
To walk in places you don’t normally plod.
To abandon reason and leap with unfettered glee.

I need a fresh rain.
I need to remember what it feels like to soak my dignity.
To forget whom I have unfortunately become
and simply feel rain again on my young face.

I need a fresh rain that will draw my face heavenward.
That will provoke me to open my eyes
and gaze into the falling rejuvenation.

I need a fresh rain.



 

a partial commitment to the body...

Broken for community
by F. Kefa Sempangi

Unless we are broken, we are of no use to God.
And unless we are broken, we are of no use to the community of believers of which we are a part.
Hardly any of us can go to his or her Christian community and say, "This is my body which is broken for you. I am laying all my professional skills, abilities, and economic resources at your disposal. Take them and use them as you see fit."

We cannot say this, because we are not broken. We are too proud to give our lives away to people who are not perfect. We don't want to lose ourselves for sinners. We want to find the perfect person and the perfect community, but we never find them.

So, like Judas, we make only a partial commitment to the body of believers to which we belong, and we find our identity in our rebellion from them. Unlike Paul who clearly saw his identity - "an apostle of Jesus Christ" - in terms of his function in the body, we see our identity in how we are different from the body and opposed to it.

If we are following Jesus, we cannot wait for the perfect community. It was while we were yet sinners that Christ allowed his body to be broken for us. Jesus lays the foundation for community life in the midst of betrayal: "the Lord Jesus Christ, the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread..." He gave thanks and broke it and gave it. Our commitment to one another in community can be no less than his: "This is my body broken for you."

This statue currently stands outside the Iraqi palace, now home to the 4th Infantry division. It will eventually be shipped home and put in the memorial museum in Fort Hood, Texas.

The statue was created by an Iraqi artist named Kalat, who for years was forced by Saddam Hussein to make the many hundreds of bronze busts of Saddam that dotted Baghdad.

Kalat was so grateful for the Americans liberation of his country; he melted 3 of the heads of the fallen Saddam and made the statue as a memorial to the American soldiers and their fallen warriors. Kalat worked on this memorial night and day for several months.

To the left of the kneeling soldier is a small Iraqi girl giving the soldier comfort as he mourns the loss of his comrade in arms.
 

I saw this painting and it reminded me of my two younger brothers and I.
We were blessed to be able to be raised in many places that allowed us to swim, fish and hike for countless hours unfettered by nervous parents, creepy villains or impatient curfews. Those were good days, when you could roam about the little world you lived in and not be afraid of someone killing, raping or harming you. Let's go exploring was a phrase that I am not sure if I have even heard my boys say that much. It was always on our lips. Caves, ravines, dark forests, tall trees, holes, basements, attics, old trucks, abandoned cisterns, burned out houses, huge red barns with owls in the rafters, dens of beasts, long dusty roads, leech infested ponds and irrigation streams. hours and hours of fort building, potion making, army chasing, skin diving and on and on it went.
Those were good times! 

Well today is the end of an era. Micah went to his first day of school. He is going 2 days a week at a local christian pre-school. Mom called crying...he was so excited he pretty much forgot to say good-bye...poor mom. It is hard passing through the changing seasons of life.  

Kona got revenge at last and put Micah in the kennel... 

Here is a Micah looking through the shrubs, he kept getting his hands in the snow and freaking out.  

It's snowing again... 

Here is a picture from the Tsunami the my younger brother Matt shot. There are some more pictures with Matt's commentary on them at his website. It's a bit more helpful to hear him share about each shot.
As you read and look, remember this: currently the US has designated about 350 million to the relief work; practically with support, supplies, transportation, logistics, I am sure it's far more hard dollars but....$350 million comes out to about $1 per American.
I don't know about you but I think we can do better than that as citizens of the world.
According to Matt, he saw the Red Cross and World Relief doing major work on the ground. I am game for choosing World Relief (http://www.wr.org) because I know they have solid infrastructure to get the job done and do the long term work as well. Just my opinion.
Here is my brothers site: http://matblauer.blogspot.com
 

Tragic

World Vision estimates that between 10 to 14 million children are victims of the sex trade and that another one million children enter the prostitution racket every year. Of the one million prostitutes in Thailand 80% are under 18.

The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity I need! My name in print! That really makes somebody! Things are going to start happening to me now...I just laugh when I think of this line form The Jerk, one of my favorite Steve martin movies. I saw this quoted at another blog and it reminded me of the movie. That man hates cans!!! LOL! what a scene. I got to rent that again.
 

Professional agitators...

"The whole tribe of professional agitators and miscalled reformers are men of one idea.
That these men do good, sometimes directly and frequently indirectly, I do not deny;
and it is equally evident that they do a great deal of harm, the worst of which, perhaps, falls upon themselves.

Like the charge of a cannon, they do damage to an enemy's fortifications, but they burn up the powder there is in them, and lose the ball. Like blind old Samson, they may prostrate the pillars of a great wrong, but they crush themselves and the Philistines together.

The greatest and truest reformer that ever lived was Jesus Christ; but ah! The difference between his broad aims, universal sympathies and overflowing love, and the malignant spirit that moves those who angrily beat themselves to death against an instituted wrong!"
-from a chapter called "Men of one idea" in the book "Lessons in Life" by Timothy Titcomb, 1863